Welcome to tracker mentoring, a place to practice your tracking with a community of peers, and world-class mentors. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, and especially for reading about this… our inaugural offering!
“This is a time to create and share content that engages, entertains, educates and inspires the world.” A quote we love, from dear friend Dan Gardoqui in the USA.
The birth of a dream… Tracker Mentoring
In a world wracked with illness, suffering and isolation, all of us, across the world went into lock-down. Our governments pleaded with us to move into socially distant situations, to leave our jobs, and to keep away from those we love and know. This, we believe, was done with the best of intentions, for our own safety. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen. With tourism, nature travel and wilderness education in a virus-induced-coma, with isolation being the new ‘normal’, we thought to ourselves – “how do we still reach our people?”
Well, Tracker Mentoring was born of this idea, and, fortunately, to us it was not a new, panic-driven concept. Kersey Lawrence and Lee Gutteridge have spoken of this for years, writing down pages of notes… dreaming up an online learning platform to share what we have spent decades learning, a way to reach everyone through affordable, high quality internet-based content. You can reach us on your smartphone, your tablet or iPad, your laptop…. And…we can reach you too!
Tracker Mentors?
In addition to our many years spent tracking, and teaching tracking, Kersey has decades of teaching at wilderness schools and as a university level educator. She’s received awards for her teaching after putting into practice her formal instruction on classroom, online, hybrid, flipped, and experiential learning. We combined this with Lee’s authored books, and his enthusiasm for a wide Southern African tracking and naturalist knowledge base.
Then, we asked web-guru, Shaun Retief, to build an outstanding platform to help us to help you learn.
We believe this has culminated in an outstanding educational series, leading you down the incredible rabbit-hole of tracking – in the safety of your own home. We truly believe that through this medium you can learn, prepare, absorb information, build routines and start to grasp the intricacies of the world’s oldest (and newest) art and science.
To us, EVERYTHING is tracking, and TRACKING is everything! (Trackers will know what we mean.)
Our lockdown was spent, like many others I guess, behind our desks, in our home. But we spent our time writing, designing, planning, building the most comprehensive online tracking series available today. This terrible world pandemic gave us the time to create this for you.
Our goal at Tracker Mentoring is to facilitate learning and inspire growth in our students, who often become part of our “Tracker Tribe.” We want to guide and push you forward on a process of learning and discovery, whether you live in the city or in the bush, and whether you are a novice or already an expert. There is always something new to learn, whoever you are and wherever you go! In fact, as you learn new things from us, we look forward to learning new things from you during this process.
Hopefully this will lead you to explore the safe woodlands around your Connecticut home, the patch of ‘veld’ in your Johannesburg suburb, the local park in central Cape Town City, or the gorgeous Private Game Reserve that you visit from time to time during the holidays. And, one day, when things return to some level of normalcy (hopefully a much more aware and less impactful type of normalcy) this might also lead to you choosing to be Practically Evaluated one day, on the world-wide gold standard for trackers, the CyberTracker System, with one of its many expert and wonderful assessors across the world.
Welcome to Tracker mentoring, and we truly hope you love the journey of learning with us.
Now, for an amazing new discovery, like we promised this Newsletter would provide: The backwards-footed bird.
For some time now we have been puzzled by the crested barbet. Every time I checked for the tracks of a bird I saw on the ground, I struggled to find the trail of the bird going the way I saw the bird go…
The reason for this, we finally discovered when we had a dead, road-killed specimen, is because the central two forward facing toes of this zygodactyl birds are touching, and the hind two are open wide…so it looks like the bird’s tracks are going the wrong way!
The crested barbet moves exclusively in a hopping pattern on the ground, and never walks. The track is 4.6cm long. We don’t know yet if other barbets have a similar track, because we have not seen them land on the ground except on hard surfaces to drink water! Other species, such as the black-collared barbet, seem to spend far less time on the ground, whereas the crested barbet is commonly seen hopping along.
This is newly documented information that isn’t even in Lee’s newly published (Feb 2020) Birds of Southern Africa and their Tracks & Signs! Here’s Lee’s sketch of the track.
Launching of our courses
The first course is now up and running, and is looking great. Access through our interactive eLearning centre in our website and the private Facebook Group (students only, sorry!) gives you control over how fast or how slowly you wish to work.
Process, the process of thinking like a tracker – that’s what the first course in our Southern Africa Tracking Series is all about. Each course in the series comes with a manual, The Tracker Mentoring Manual, with a unique focus. The Tracker Mentoring Manual for course 1, focuses on an Introduction to Tracking in Southern Africa. It’s a “how-to” guide. It’s filled with teaching stories and photos, as well as 30 practical Assignments and 10 daily Routines, all designed to help you develop the habits necessary to excel at tracking.
Courses two through five are coming soon – good things take time. Course 2 features the Mammals of Southern Africa and their Tracks &Signs, and is based on the published field-guide with the same title by Lee Gutteridge and Louis Liebenberg. Course 3 is all about invertebrate tracks and signs. Bird tracks and signs are featured in course 4, and course 5 is about Trailing, or following fresh tracks and signs to find animals.
Other, featured items from our shop
In this time of facemasks and keeping safe, we have produced our own Tracker Mentoring buffs, to wear over your mouth and nose, or as a scarf, depending upon the circumstance. These are available at our online shop on the Tracker Mentoring website. We have wallet-sized rulers (with imperial and metric scale), and an inexpensive version of a spiral bound Tracker Journal and Weather Journal, too. Develop good habits while you stay as safe and healthy as you can!
Support for CyberTracker
Our new range of life-sized animal track charts, designed by Nicholas Knott-Craig for Tracker Mentoring are uniquely available from our shop. These charts are life sized renditions of the spoor of various African animals, as drawn by Louis Liebenberg, and the money we earn for this amazing product (besides production costs) will be donated to the Indigenous/Elder Master Tracker Fund to assist Louis with his life-quest of supporting the San communities in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and Namibia. Louis’ passion for this endeavour is part of what put tracking on the map today, so we are proud to contribute to this noteworthy cause.
Other opportunities to donate for the increased recognition and continual improvement of trackers is always in our minds, so please feel free to explore this aspect of our webpage, under Sponsorship Options.
Thank you for following us!
We’ve started a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to, as well as this Newsletter. As always, videos and newsletters are going to be sporadic, but always informative! We really hope you enjoyed the new information and the new drawings we have shared with you here, and look forward to adding to your personal knowledge base (and ours!) of southern African tracking over the months to come!
Always Tracking, Lee & Kersey
Other articles you may find interesting
- Introducing Tracker Mentoring! (And, introducing the tracks of the Crested Barbet!)
- Green Pigeon Scat, South Africa
Useful Products
- SA Bird Tracks Poster
- Birds of Southern Africa and Their Tracks and Signs
- SA “Hoofed” Animal Tracks Poster
